Eyes on me

Look close enough, and you’ll see inside my soul.

She stands motionless at the edge of the crosswalk, a statue in a city allergic to stillness. Around her, the world convulses—taxis screech like wounded animals, neon signs flicker like faulty synapses, and strangers brush past, their eyes glued to screens or sidewalks or anything but her. Her gaze never wavers from the traffic light, its glow a tiny sun in the urban dusk. Look close enough, and you’ll see inside my soul, she thinks, the mantra a heartbeat beneath her ribs. It’s not an invitation but a challenge, carved into the tightness of her fists, the arch of her spine. I am not a silhouette. Not a metaphor. Not a mirror for your hunger.

She notices it first in the tightening of her throat when she walks past a construction site—the low whistle like a blade grazing her spine, the laughter that follows as if her discomfort were the punchline. Her shoulders curl inward, an instinct older than language. Don’t look up. Don’t meet their eyes. Don’t give them a reason. But the gaze is relentless, a heat lamp peeling her skin back to raw nerve. She is dissected into parts: legs, hips, lips. A collection of adjectives, not a person.

The male gaze is a hall of mirrors, but the reflection is never hers. It’s theirs—their hunger, their fear, their fragile masculinity. When she looks into it, she doesn’t see herself. She sees what they need her to be: a blank screen for their insecurities, a trophy, a cautionary tale.

But what if she smashes the glass? What if she stares back—not with defiance or flirtation, but with the quiet violence of being unfiltered? Let them flinch at her unapologetic humanity. Let them grapple with her complexity, her mess, her refusal to be a metaphor.

"Men Looking at Woman" by street photographer Sabine Weiss, New York city, 1955.

The worst part isn’t the staring—it’s the erasure. The way their eyes glide past her degrees, her wit, her grief, fixating on the curve of her waist. As if her mind were decorative. At work, her ideas are “adorable” until a man repeats them. In meetings, her assertiveness is “aggressive,” her passion “dramatic.” She becomes fluent in the art of self-sabotage: softening her voice, prefacing opinions with apologies, laughing at jokes that aren’t funny. All to make her brilliance bite-sized for their egos.

This is the paradox of womanhood: to be told you are a masterpiece while being sanded into something digestible. For millennia, men have been handed a script—conquer, consume, collect—and women, the role of collateral. But what if we burned the script? What if her body is not a territory to claim but a language to decipher? A dialect of stretch marks, silenced rebellions, and the quiet fury of survival?

In a sunlit studio, dust motes dance in the air like constellations. A sculptor digs her fingers into clay, molding a figure with hips wide enough to birth galaxies and shoulders squared against the weight of expectation. “A woman is not marble,” she mutters, smudging the pristine lines of the torso. “Marble is cold. Dead. She is clay—alive, shifting, stubborn.” Her hands remember her grandmother’s spine, bent from hauling water in a drought-stricken village; her mother’s knees, scarred from scrubbing floors to pay for a daughter’s education; her own palms, calloused from carving space in a world that demands she apologize for existing.

Society prefers its women polished. Silent. A statue on a pedestal is safe—admired from a distance, stripped of agency. Praise her “delicate beauty,” but call her “too fragile” when she cracks. Worship her youth, then discard her when time etches its story into her skin. Celebrate her silence, then label her “shrill” when she speaks. But clay is not passive. It resists. It cracks. It remembers.

The sculptor presses her thumb into the figure’s chest, leaving a fingerprint over the heart. “Perfect art is a lie,” she says. “True art moves. It breathes. It bleeds.” Think of Frida Kahlo, painting her broken body in vivid technicolor, her spine a column of thorns. Audre Lorde, turning her rage into a scalpel to dissect injustice. Pina Bausch, choreographing trauma into something transcendent. These women didn’t just break the frame—they set it ablaze and danced in the ashes.

We are taught to see women as landscapes: something to traverse, own, or flatten into postcards. Her laughter is a trinket; her anger, a storm to be weathered. Her mind? A locked room men insist on misnaming. “Mysterious,” they sigh, as if her complexity were a riddle to solve rather than a cosmos to wander.

But step inside that cosmos. Beneath the surface, there are shipwrecks—loves swallowed by riptides, dreams capsized by practicality. Coral reefs built from midnights spent soothing fevered brows and mending fractured hearts. Currents of fury so deep they could drag empires under. Yet when she speaks, they call it a “phase,” a “wave,” something hormonal, *hysterical*. As if the ocean itself could be dismissed as a passing mood.

History’s tides, though, are pulled by women who refused to be still. Take Rosa Parks’ quiet “no,” a seismic shift disguised as stillness. Malala Yousafzai’s pen, mightier than the bullet that tried to silence her. The factory workers of the 1800s, stitching their rage into banners demanding bread and roses. What power calls “hysteria” is simply her refusal to dissolve.

Her body is not a spectacle. It is an archive. Every stretch mark is a ledger—of growth, of hunger, of surviving diets meant to shrink her into something palatable. Every scar is a map: the knee split open climbing trees in a childhood they told her to “outgrow,” the C-section line that split her open to let life in, the burn on her wrist from a lover who mistook her for a saint and cursed her when she bled. Society says, Hide these. Shame these. But the sculptor’s hands linger on the clay’s imperfections. “You want to erase her scars? Then erase her story.”

Men speak of legacies built on battlefields and boardrooms. What of the legacies etched into women’s bodies? The teacher’s chalk-caked hands, rewriting futures one student at a time. The nurse cradling life in the fluorescent hum of an ICU. The teenager scribbling poems in the margins of her trauma, her pen a lifeline. These are not footnotes. They are epics.

Imagine this: Your gaze is a spotlight. For centuries, it’s trained on her hips, her lips, the curve of her neck—fragments reduced to symbols. Now shift the beam. Illuminate the spaces you’ve been taught to ignore: the weight of her silence, the calculus behind her smile, the way she tucks generations into her stride.

Ask not, What can she be for me? but Who is she beyond me?

The poet’s daughter learns early to fold herself into origami swans—delicate, compact, designed to fit in men’s palms. But when she unfolds, she is a wildfire. A phoenix. A symphony. It terrifies them. How dare she take up space? How dare she refuse to collapse into a placeholder for their longing?

We fear women’s minds because they defy containment. Her thoughts are constellations—patterns that rearrange your sky. Her anger is tectonic, her joy volcanic. To call her “too emotional” is to confess your terror of all you cannot grasp.

Consider Hypatia, torn apart by a mob for daring to teach astronomy. Mary Wollstonecraft, branded a “hyena in petticoats” for defending women’s right to think. The witches burned not for their magic but for their autonomy. Centuries change; the fear remains. A woman who thinks is a woman who cannot be controlled.

But here’s the secret they never tell you: Her mind is not a locked room. It’s a doorway. Step through. Let her ideas dismantle your delusions. Let her questions unmake your certainties. What you’ll find is not a mystery, but a mirror: *Who are you when the performance ends?*

This is not about blame. It’s about excavation. Dig up the roots of the stories we’ve inherited—the fairy tales that sold girls as prizes, the myths that conflated authority with masculinity, the religions that painted women as sin incarnate. Plant new ones. Let them grow wild. Let them be messy. Let them have thorns.

Teach boys that vulnerability is not weakness but the birthplace of courage. Teach girls that their worth isn’t currency to be spent on approval. Teach the world that “feminine” and “masculine” are cages, and the future belongs to those brave enough to dissolve them.

To see a woman is to surrender the stories of her. It’s witnessing the firefighter who carries survivors from flames, her muscles singing with purpose. The CEO breastfeeding during a board meeting, refusing to choose between life and ambition. The grandmother in Kyiv, baking bread in a bombed-out kitchen, her hands steady as a heartbeat. Her body is not a commodity—it’s a compass. Her scars are not flaws but coordinates, marking where she’s been, where she’s going, what she’s survived.

When we shift the lens, we see her not as “other,” but as a reflection. Her struggles expose our complacency. Her courage reveals our cowardice. Her humanity? It dares us to reclaim our own.

The soul, once witnessed, becomes a mirror.

The next chapter isn’t about rewriting her. It’s about unraveling ourselves—thread by thread, lie by lie—until all that’s left is the truth: We are not gods. We are not saviors. We are collaborators in a story still being told.

So let it be messy. Let it be loud. Let it be alive. Beyond my beloved horizon ❤